Our Post-Enlightenment Landscape

Has Modern Western Culture influenced the way we operate in medicine in the 21st century? Has it somehow shaped and formed us in its own image? Or have we been able to maintain our commitment to the unique mystery and wonder of the human person amidst the wealth of technological advances of modernity into hypermodernity?

Like many notable thinkers, it may be well to contend that we cannot understand the state of medicine in our era without exploring the roots of Western Culture, specially as it was developed in the Enlightenment. As Michael Polanyi contended in the 1962 McEnerney Lectures, human history could be divided very simply into two categories—the age before the?? French Revolution; and the age afterwards. Whether or not we accept such a breakdown, at the very least, we should ask the question why a man of the stature of Polanyi—a world-renowned philosopher of science, a Nobel Prize-level physical chemist and a mentor of numerous Nobel Prize laureates (his own son being one of them), held such a theory.

And while we will not seek to settle such a question here, we would only ask a few simple questions:

Did something happen in this period that radically reshaped the way we view the human person?

Have the advances that have occurred in biomedicine, which now allow us to keep a body alive for periods upon periods, somehow eclipsed our reverence of the human person?

Has medicine become the pathway to solving the enigma of disease, over understanding the suffering person before us?

Is it no longer an entrance into the complexity of their unique experience with the unknown, but rather a prescription derived from our presumptions of control?

No longer a desire for healing , but an expectation of temporary cure?